Interview: Why liberal orders weaken themselves

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At the latest with the change of government in the USA, the challenge of stabilizing liberal orders has assumed greater urgency than ever on political, academic and public agendas: How can liberal orders remain stable and continue to exist? Christoph Knill, Berthold Rittberger and Bernhard Zangl, all political scientists at LMU, propose a new take on current challenges and attacks.

It may be that liberal orders stumble over that which underwrites their success, you wrote in a recent publication. At first glance, this hypothesis appears rather jarring.

Bernhard Zangl: JIt does, yes. But we have found lots of examples of this happening. To date, most research has assumed that external forces are what put liberal orders on the defensive. And indeed, Trump’s presidencies in the USA, China’s ascendency and the rise of right-wing populist forces are challenging them on both the international and national levels. Our investigation, however, shifts the focus: Our hypothesis is that these critical developments are to some extent home-made – that liberal orders themselves have contributed to them.

Christoph Knill: It is about mechanisms and processes that initially play a decisive role in stabilizing liberal democratic orders, but that, under certain conditions, can then contribute to the destabilization of these orders. That is not to say that liberal orders then fail completely, but that a certain downward trend is at least set in motion.

International order under pressure

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First the success, then the threat of the opposite? Can you explain that?

Zangl: Take the liberal international order, for example. One reason why it is liberal is precisely that it was not just imposed by a hegemon, the USA. After 1945, the United States made it clear from the outset that other countries can have their say, and they took care to involve them. This approach has been very successful, because it gave the international order legitimacy and, with it, stability.

And today?

Zangl: Today, the USA is turning away from the order it itself created. It is doing so in part because the Americans have realized that involving other countries gave the order legitimacy but eroded their control. The US retreat is now putting the whole order under pressure.

Berthold Rittberger: Another example: Think of the rescue of the euro. Back then, the European Union institutionalized a very heavily neoliberal-inspired rescue policy and foisted it on the various states that were on the brink of national insolvency. But it did so without discussing whether this made sense for Greece, Italy and Ireland themselves. This dogmatism exposed them to the accusation that they had gone much too far with their liberal policy. Serious doubts were raised about whether the currency union project was still viable, and not only in the countries affected.

Demand for problem solving by the state is increasing

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Knill: And we have found another one of these mechanisms.

Which is…?

Knill: You can, for instance, explain the expansion of the welfare state as the response of the democratic order to societal needs. In itself, democratic responsiveness to societal interests is a good thing: The state looks after its citizens, keeps the environment clean, provides adequate social conditions. So, essentially, this is a success story for liberal orders, and it strengthens the legitimacy of democracy. Yet at the same time we see downstream problems, above all in the form of resource exhaustion and bureaucratic overload due to growing and more complex bodies of regulations. When this happens, the same responsiveness that stabilizes democratic orders can also play a part in destabilizing them.

And there is the threat of inflationary expectations and promises?

Knill: Yes. The responsiveness of democratic orders creates a situation where calls for the state to solve problems just grow louder and louder. Governments that want to be re-elected adopt new social programs that push the welfare state to its limits, as well as leading to ever more complex regulations. All of which triggers a mechanism of exhaustion that can potentially delegitimate the democratic system.

The same dynamic everywhere

Rittberger: Take the EU legislation to regulate supply chains, which was recently trimmed down in the European Parliament by a conservative and radical right majority. Originally, it grew out of a liberal agenda for social regulation: to commit companies to ecological and social standards regarding the production conditions of their suppliers.

Zangl: The export of liberal ideas …

Rittberger: Exactly. But then, debate around the law became hugely politicized. Populists framed it as a symbol of everything that is wrong with the EU. Ultimately, it was torn apart based on the rationale of cutting red tape. It was alleged that, because of overregulation, the law would drive companies to the verge of bureaucratic exhaustion.

The UN, the WTO, the welfare state, supply chains: The list almost sounds a bit random. What is the thread that links these examples together?

Zangl: The fact that the examples appear disparate actually shows how widespread the phenomenon is. It is not just happening somewhere in the welfare state or somewhere in the World Trade Organization. You see the same dynamics at work everywhere. At some point, a liberal stabilization mechanism reaches a tipping point where it flips and begins to have a destabilizing effect. Our belief is that we need to better understand these mechanisms in order to grasp why liberal orders are today under pressure wherever you look. It is not a coincidence; it is a home-made issue.

So, what can we do with this interpretative framework? Are there any implications for future developments?

Knill: For research purposes, it is first of all an analytical grid to give visibility to these dynamics and let us examine them as part of a major research project, which is in planning. We will have to see what academic and political consequences can be drawn from all this. When does it become politically more responsible not to act responsively in individual cases? When and how is it possible to attenuate the risk that stabilization might flip into destabilization?

Rittberger: That is the intriguing question: When and under what conditions does stability turn into destabilization? Significant conclusions can be drawn from this kind of insight. The current debate around pensions is one example where one can get the impression that creeping destabilization processes are at work. Do we face a crisis imminently? Has the tipping point been reached? Or will it not be for another 20 years? The question is raised again and again in political debate, but the forces of inertia are so great that things are simply left to go on as they are.

Knill: We don’t know what the long-term effects will be. That is one of the empirical questions. Destabilization does not automatically imply that a liberal order will go down the drain. It could be that a countermovement might restore a new balance in a few years, or that a stabilizing correction might put things back on an even keel.

Zangl: In a later phase of the project, precisely this question will be addressed: Are there ways to restabilize liberal orders, and what are they? In the end, that could indeed lead to recommendations for political actors. That is certainly our ambition.

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In an essay in the influential Foreign Affairs magazine, you recently proffered some assistance in the context of international relations: more pragmatism and less proceduralism, i.e. standardized routines; more pluralism instead of universalism; more politics and less technocracy. Does this mean that everything should be more normative and less dogmatic?

Rittberger: JYes, and those are the first conclusions we have drawn from our analysis, in which Laura Seelkopf and Andreas Kruck – both of whom are also at LMU – were likewise involved. Liberal international orders very often respond to criticism and attacks by taking more and more of the liberal medicine. But in doing so, they make themselves increasingly vulnerable because they disqualify criticism as irrational, out of sync with the liberal playbook, instead of being open and accepting politicization, bearing in mind that that is what genuinely instills legitimacy. Conversely, a constantly defensive posture tends rather to give ammunition to those who would attack liberal orders: Witness the growing populism, the criticism directed at experts and scholars, of organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO), where we would say that these organizations make judgments based on scientific methods and findings. But they are increasingly coming under fire because they are framed as aloof.

Knill: But let me say again: What is new and special about our approach is that we are saying it is rooted in the liberal order itself. The challenges, the threats do not come solely from the outside. On the contrary, they could be weaknesses in the order itself. Up to now, this new focus has been absent from the entire discussion.

Zangl: None of us saw these weaknesses until now, because we are accustomed to seeing them as strengths. And that is what they are, essentially: liberal strengths such as inclusivity and responsiveness.

Rittberger: One might go so far as to say that China’s ascendency is in part likewise rooted in the success of liberal orders – in the success of a liberal world trade order that made it possible for the Chinese economic model to become so strong in the first place. And that would make the Trump phenomenon a symptom of the development we are describing rather than a cause.

Prof. Dr. Christoph Knill holds the Chair of Empirical Theories of Politics at LMU’s Geschwister Scholl Institute of Political Science (GSI).

Prof. Dr. Berthold Rittberger holds the Chair of International Relations at LMU’s Geschwister Scholl Institute of Political Science (GSI).

Prof. Dr. Bernhard Zangl holds the Chair of Global Governance and Public Policy at LMU’s Geschwister Scholl Institute of Political Science (GSI).

Publication:

Christoph Knill, Andreas Kruck, Berthold Rittberger, Laura Seelkopf and Bernhard Zangl: Failing through success? How stable liberal orders become self-destabilizing. Journal of European Public Policy, 2025

For more on the topic, see:

Stacie E. Goddard, Ronald R. Krebs, Christian Kreuder-Sonnen, and Berthold Rittberger: Liberalism Doomed the Liberal International Order. Foreign Affairs, 2025